Heroku operates the largest fleet of Postgres databases in the world. Service oriented architecture, infrastructure as code, and fault tolerance make it possible. Come hear how the Heroku Postgres team uses a handful of Ruby applications to operate and scale the largest herd of your favorite elephant themed RDBMS.

Traditionally these apps have been Ruby web applications. But as both the platform and its users mature, we are seeing the complexity of hosted apps increase, with more complex infrastructure systems running on Heroku.

Today, nobody is more interested in running infrastructure on Heroku than Heroku itself, as self-hosting offers massive benefits and is a fascinating engineering puzzle to boot.

We will first discuss the concept of self-hosting and why it such an interesting computer science problem, and a vital property of many systems. Compilers, revision control systems and application platforms all exhibit similar properties of bootstrapping, cross-compiling, and avoiding circular dependencies.

Then we will take a look at the more interesting self-hosted components of Heroku such as the the distributed application compiler that used to be a server farm but now is little more than a Heroku app that can even compile itself for releasing new versions.

All of this will show how working towards a self-hosted platform results in comprehensive consistency assurance and gains in efficiency, noble goals for such a complex software system.

More than most Ruby developers would expect, turns out; what is aggravated by the lack of documentation and other resources on this topic.

In this talk we'll dive into both development practices (hot compatibility, database migrations, caching) and deployment setup (Heroku, Unicorn, HAProxy), covering everything you need to know in order to ship code without affecting a single customer.

So...Continuous Deployment. You hear that you should be practicing continuous deployment, but nobody every pointed out that there are many different ways to do it!
This talk compares and contrasts different kinds of continuous deployment strategies. Implementation, requirements, tradeoffs will be covered. Case-studies, examining different strategies practiced at companies such as Facebook, GitHub, IMVU, Heroku and CircleCI.